The Scream Catcher: (A Thriller)

By Vincent Zandri

Life doesn't end with a whimper . . . it ends with a scream.

 

Jude Parish has demons. Demons so real he can almost feel the beasts with black, reptilian eyes and razor-sharp fangs taking up residence where his once confident soul resides. Demons that ended his career as a violent crimes cop.

 

Now the former cop turned bestselling true crime author is hoping to lead a quiet, peaceful life in the idyllic Adirondack vacation town of Lake George, New York with his pregnant wife and young son. But when Jude becomes witness to a bizarre "kill game" in which the killer insists on recording the screams of his victims prior to shooting them dead, the ex-cop's life is turned upside down.

 

Jude knows he has no choice but to fight his demon-fear and take on the role when he's asked to act as the state's "star witness." What he doesn't realize at the time is that the killer's arrest is actually the first level in a carefully designed first-person kill game involving his family as "players" and ultimately victims.

It won't be "Game Over" until the killer catches the screams of his tortured victims.

 

How will the kill game end? Can Jude face his demons and save his family? Or will they devour him and those he has sworn to protect?

 

Scroll up and grab this stunning thriller!

 

The action never wanes." —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

 

"Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting." —Harlan Coben, Bestselling Author of Six Years

 

"Non-stop action." —I Love a Mystery

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Zandri
• Release date: Jun 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513052052

Vincent Zandri

"Vincent Zandri hails from the future." --The New York Times “Sensational . . . masterful . . . brilliant.” --New York Post "Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting." --Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling author of Six Years "Tough, stylish, heartbreaking." --Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of Savages and Cartel. Winner of the 2015 PWA Shamus Award and the 2015 ITW Thriller Award for Best Original Paperback Novel for MOONLIGHT WEEPS, Vincent Zandri is the NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and AMAZON KINDLE OVERALL NO.1 bestselling author of more than 60 novels and novellas including THE REMAINS, EVERYTHING BURNS, ORCHARD GROVE, THE SHROUD KEY and THE GIRL WHO WASN'T THERE. His list of domestic publishers include Delacorte, Dell, Down & Out Books, Thomas & Mercer, Polis Books, Suspense Publishing, Blackstone Audio, and Oceanview Publishing. An MFA in Writing graduate of Vermont College, his work is translated in the Dutch, Russian, French, Italian, and Japanese. Having sold close to 1 million editions of his books, Zandri has been the subject of major features by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Business Insider. He has also made appearances on Bloomberg TV and the FOX News network. In December 2014, Suspense Magazine named Zandri's, THE SHROUD KEY, as one of the "Best Books of 2014." Suspense Magazine selected WHEN SHADOWS COME as one of the "Best Books of 2016". He was also a finalist for the 2019 Derringer Award for Best Novelette. A freelance photojournalist, freelance writer, and the author of the popular "lit blog," The Vincent Zandri Vox, Zandri has written for Living Ready Magazine, RT, New York Newsday, Hudson Valley Magazine, The Times Union (Albany), Game & Fish Magazine, CrimeReads, Altcoin Magazine, The Jerusalem Post, Market Business News, Duke University, Colgate University, and many more. He also writes for Scalefluence. An Active Member of MWA and ITW, he lives in New York and Florence, Italy. For more go to VINZANDRI.COM

Book preview

Prologue

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Sweeny’s Boxing Gym

Lake George, New York

Tuesday, August 15, 2010

6:10 A.M.

The man is hiding. Has been for a long time now, since his life—his physical body—became reduced to a shadowy reflection of his own fear. A fear so real, so palpable and heavy, it seems like there are times it might be possible for him to unzip it like you would a second skin and maybe hang it up on a sixpenny nail to dry. If only that were possible.

But his fear is more than skin deep. It is both an internal demon and it is bone cold and stubborn. It is what he has in the place of a soul. Rather, it is what replaced his soul. Only when he least expected it did it reveal its beastly head of pale white skin, black eyes, and fang-like teeth before entering into his body and holding him hostage.

Ever since that day he has been trying his best to purge the demon from his body. But he does not use a priest for his exorcist. He does not use a shaman. He does not use a psychiatrist. He does not use God.

He uses only physical exertion.

He attempts to push the fear out through his ribs by improving his physical body with exercise. Grueling exercise on an everyday basis. Running, lifting, boxing, hiking, sweating, groaning, pushing, pulling, crying, bleeding, sucking air, and on occasion, passing out. It’s bad that those closest to him no longer trust him. It’s worse that he no longer trusts himself. And a man who cannot trust himself, can never know what it is to love or be loved.

Yet, he lives and carries on as if today—this very moment in time—will be the end of something bad and the beginning of a new life free of the demon.

But today will not be that day.

Because today, Jude Parish forty-five-year-old ex-cop turned true crime writer, gets to be the eyewitness to a murder. Here’s how it happens:

He’s only just exited Sweeney’s Boxing Gym by way of the back door. It’s raining. The new summer dawn hidden by a black and blue sky; its heat by fierce wind gusts; its calm by lightning and thunder. The early morning workout—six rounds jump rope, six rounds speed bag, six rounds heavy bag—is all but historical fact. Now, oxygen starved lungs crave the fresh air; tired muscles and joints welcome cool rain. Kissing the sky, Jude lets the rain pelt a stubbled face, soak cropped hair, dampen gray sweats.

Mounted to the block wall behind him are a reflective exit sign and a lit spotlight. To his right, a blue dumpster with the letters B.F.I. printed on the four metal side panels. To his left, an open sea of cracked and blistered blacktop. Beyond that, a too dark nothing that stretches way beyond the Canadian border.

Dead ahead, he spots two people.

At first glance it appears to be a long-haired man chasing a T-shirted man from out of the old Malloy gravel pit. Two grown men stumble down the pit embankment, crash through second growth woods like a couple of hunted deer until spilling out onto the flat lot.

Back pressed against the block wall, Jude watches, listening to his heartbeat inside his temples. He’s no stranger to the pit. As a boy, he used to play Johnny Quest inside the big dig during the day, but never at night when the Lake George Dark Monster came out of hiding. Standing in the rain, his mind recalls deep craters, jagged shale, abandoned automobiles, empty beer bottles, used condoms and rock piles galore. The images flashback while he works up a smile. Black Bear’s Bar and Grille is located on the opposite north end of the old pit. Black Bear’s is open all night for the commercial salmon and charter fishermen and their pickled livers.

As for the running men?

They must be drunk as rabid skunks.

Pulling himself away from the wall, he sucks in a wet breath, prepares for the two-mile jog back home to pregnant wife and child when the T-shirted man drops to his knees on the pavement, when Longhair raises up a hand exposing a silenced automatic.

What happens next takes forever and an instant.

Longhair extends the right arm, presses the automatic to T-shirt’s head. Scream, he orders in a strange, high-pitched voice. Scream. For. Me.

The man on his knees hesitates. Peering slowly up at the long-haired man, he doesn’t scream. He produces only silence and a frightened smile. Until Longhair thumbs back the hammer on the automatic.

Scream, he repeats, bringing a handheld device to the mouth of the T-shirted man. Scream or die.

T-shirted man loses his smile. He lowers his head, swallows a deep breath.

He screams. Screams so loud the guttural shriek bounces off the side of the gym and rattles Jude’s bones.

He screams directly into the hand-held device. A device that by now, Jude is certain is an iPhone.

Thank you, says Longhair when the scream is finished.

That’s when two muzzle flashes light the dark sky for two brief instances.

Longhair takes a step back.

T-Shirt falls face first. French kisses a rain puddle.

My God, Jude whispers to himself. My God almighty.

But there’s nothing God Almighty can do now.

Longhair slides the automatic into a shoulder holster and pockets the iPhone. Sensing another presence, he turns, laser beams a gaze in the ex-cop’s direction.

That’s when Jude’s body becomes the suddenly pinpricked balloon.

All strength bleeds out of his feet.

He drops down onto the wet lot, rolls his body behind the BFI dumpster, hides himself behind stacks of cardboard and rain-drenched newspapers.

Heart beats a berserk rhythm. Hands tremble. Adrenalin filled brain becomes an orchestral symphony warming up inside the skull until the roar of a car engine and burning rubber kills the music.

Longhair is getting away.

What’s the ex-cop gonna do?

Ex-cop is gonna listen to the demon inside his chest, and he’s going to sit still, play dead.

The car approaches, downshifts to a crawl, then brakes to a hard stop some fifteen or twenty feet away. As soon as the passenger window goes down, Jude can’t miss it: gunmetal death staring him in the face.

Longhair has got an unobstructed shot.

When the hammer comes down the ex-cop never sees the flash. Never feels the pain.

What’s it like to die?

It’s like the lights in a room being turned out. It’s about silence and stillness and darkness. It’s freedom from the demon. It’s like falling . . .

. . . falling into a deep and painless sleep.

Part I

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The Unreliable Witness

1

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Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

Tuesday, 6:30 A.M.

But Jude is not dead.

Instead, he’s jarred awake to the voices that belong to the handful of boxing students who’ve arrived at the gym for their early morning pre-work workouts, two of whom promptly assist him off the damp pavement.

Standing awkward, out of balance, eyesight blurred to the point of blindness, he’s become the crippled sum of his fear. He begins to realize there is both good and bad news in his situation.

First, the good news: the bullet discharged from the killer’s silenced automatic only grazed the right side of his skull. The bullet, while knocking him cold, did not penetrate the brain pan.

As for the bad news: his skull feels like it’s been rammed into the block wall.

His head rings and throbs with jolts of pain. His swelled brain feeling like it’s about to explode out the ears, eyes, and nostrils. Something is bothering Jude, too. Something that only a former cop can’t help but acknowledge: if the longhaired killer finds out he missed his target, he’ll have no choice but to hunt Jude down, destroy the eyewitness to a murder.         

The Lake George summer tourist paradise is gearing up for another beautiful, beach ball-cotton candy day. The newly risen sun has already burned off the predawn rain. Maybe Jude has no way of seeing them clearly, but he can feel the ray’s warmth on his face. Sweatpants and sweatshirt are heavy with the rainwater that’s saturated them. His sneakers are damp, squishy . . . his feet itching.

His fellow boxing students do their best to hold him upright and steady, one on each arm. He tries with all his power to regain his equilibrium while big, iron bells relentlessly toll inside his bruised skull. But the imaginary bells are not loud enough to drown out the distressed voices of the boxing students.

Managing to free himself from their grips, Jude stumbles a step forward, gently touches his head wound with the tips of his fingers, comes away with sticky blood. From where he’s standing, he’s able to make out one student crying inconsolably, another student ordering the distraught woman, Don’t look at it! referring no doubt to the assassinated T-shirted man. Yet a third student—this one a man—asks him if he’s going to be okay.

I’m having trouble seeing, he whispers. But it’ll pass.

Police are on their way, the same man adds in a shaky voice. So is Jimmy Mack and an ambulance.

At the mention of his stepfather and former LGPD boss, Jude feels a knot begin to twist itself around his intestines. Not only did he witness a murder, but he froze up, allowed the murderer to get away. That clearly in mind, he isn’t sure if he can bear to look into Mack’s face when the old Captain finds out about it. Maybe he has no idea how Mack will react. But already, he can taste the top cop’s disappointment on his tongue as if he’s just swallowed a mouthful of sour milk.

By the time the first emergency siren can be heard blaring out from the near distance, the sight is already returning to his eyes.

2

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Wooded knoll behind Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

Tuesday, 6:37 A.M.

Bright blue eyes peer through the narrow tree branch openings.

Eyes focused not on all the people scattered behind the boxing gym, but instead on one man. A man the people sometimes refer to as Jude and at other times as Parish. A former Lake George police officer turned best-selling author. Or so the people whisper to one another.

Blue eyes see that Parish stands a bit unsteady, wobbly.  The ex-cop is holding his head in his heads. When Parish finally raises his head, blue eyes spot the small but noticeable gash between the temple and right ear lobe. It’s where the .22 caliber round from the silenced automatic must have grazed him instead of killing him.

Blaring from out of the distance, sirens.

The police are coming . . .

Black Dragon studies the face of Jude Parish, commits it to memory. Black Dragon wants to hear Jude Parish scream.

In his right hand, he grips the iPhone. He turns on the scream catcher app he created himself. He presses play, puts the phone to his ear. He listens to the scream the T-shirted man made just before his death. The scream sends shivers up and down his backbone.

When the first cop car hard-turns the corner into Sweeney’s back lot, Hector the Black Dragon Lennox is already bushwhacking back through the woods toward his silver sedan.

Scream for me, chants the blue-eyed beast. Scream. For. Me.

3

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Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

Tuesday, 7:01 A.M.

Shock.

It’s how the demon fucks with him, tainting his blood with a numbing poison.

With his shoulder pressed against the gym’s rear block wall and the sweat-suited boxing students keeping a strange and careful distance, as if they can smell the demon rotting inside his ribs. He’s come to see what he fully expected: the arrival of a blaze-orange and white EMS van and its two-person crew of blue-uniformed emergency technicians—one male, the other female.

Right on their tail, arriving in a Jeep cruiser is his stepfather, LGPD Captain Jimmy Mack, slate gray eyes locking onto his own through the windshield.

Mack exits the Jeep, leaving the driver’s side door wide open, radio spitting out a popping mix of static and voices. The stocky, gray-haired man nervously pulls on the ball-knot of his tie and approaches his son.

You’re hurt. It’s a question.

"Hurting, Mack. But not hurt."

Mack bites down on his lip, squints his eyes to get a better look at the cut on the right side of Jude’s head.

Just a graze, he says. Butterfly clamp will do the trick. Clearing his throat, he shifts the subject. Think you can give me a halfway decent picture of the perp?

Jude does it. No hesitation. Right from where he’s standing in the back lot.

A killer has gotten away with murder. Maybe his head feels like it’s about to split down the center; spill his brains all over the lot, but the very least he can do now is shove the demon aside and play the role of old reliable. 

He can provide the old Captain with a decent I.D. of the killer he let get away.

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When it’s done, Mack returns to his perch behind the wheel of the Jeep.

He leaves the door wide open, short, tree trunk legs hanging out, black cop shoes planted flat on the blacktop. Jude sees the old Captain pull the radio transmitter from the console, with which he begins issuing an A.P.B. on a single male, Caucasian, six-feet to six-feet-four, long blond and/or dreadlocked hair, possibly dressed in black pants, matching long-sleeved T-shirt and lace-up boots. Suspect is between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five and was last seen driving a sedan, probably foreign made, color silver or platinum. He is armed and must be approached with extreme caution.

The E.M.T.’s approach Jude, one on either side.

They make him take an awkward seat on the van’s rear fender.

Please be still, orders the short, dark-haired woman while applying a bandage and butterfly clip to the flesh wound on his head. The dressing completed, she then points a penlight flashlight into his open eyes.

The light makes Jude dizzy, lightheaded, causing him to abruptly pull away from it.

While her partner wraps a thick strap around his arm for a blood pressure reading, she suggests that an immediate E.R. visit to be followed up by a C.A.T. scan precedes any police assistance that might be required of him now.

My father will take me directly to Glens Falls Medical, he white lies.

Once more, he catches sight of Mack in the near distance. The old Captain has left the Jeep cruiser. Now he’s climbing up the gravel pit embankment, eyes beaming down at the tops of his shoes. From Jude’s perch on the E.M.S. van’s fender, he watches his father disappear over the side of the wooded embankment, down into the pit. He can’t help but wonder if the old Captain might uncover a clue that will lead to the dreadlocked killer.

A set of car keys maybe; a wallet; a calling card!

But when Mack returns from the gravel pit, Jude can’t help but notice the resignation that paints his hard face. Mack doesn’t have to say a word for Jude to know what’s happening. It’s just as he thought: no visible clues left behind inside the pit.

The pouring rain, it will have erased even footprints.

One of the half-dozen uniformed cops assigned to the crime scene escorts Jude directly to the back seat of Mack’s Jeep. Mack makes his way around the front of the vehicle, opens the passenger-side door, sets himself down. Reaching into his jacket pocket he hands over his cell phone.

Call your wife, he orders. She’ll be worried.

Jude breathes, calmly dials the number for his lakeside home. When Rosie answers, he begins telling her why he didn’t make it back immediately after the morning workout. Using a soft controlled tone, he reveals everything he can under the circumstances—that he is with Mack; that something’s happened that requires his complete attention and Yes, don’t worry, I’m okay.

As a husband, he’s not ready to reveal the fact that he nearly took a bullet to the brain. But as a former cop he does not spill even a single detail about the morning’s events, other than letting her know that a man was killed outside Sweeney’s Gym, and he just happened to be on hand to see the whole thing unfold.

He swallows.

He pictures his newly wed wife. Her long brown hair, deep brown eyes. He sees her standing in the kitchen by the big picture window that looks out over the lake. In his mind, she’s still dressed her white nightgown, a protruding belly four months pregnant, open hand gently pressed against it. He sees the ten-year-old Jack seated at the kitchen table downing a plate of buttermilk pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Through the open screen door, the bushy-haired, round-faced boy will be able to see the down-sloping back lawn, the calm lake lapping against the docks at the end of it.

His family; his life. It’s what he lives for now. It’s what he fights the demon to protect.

Has Mack asked you to be an eyewitness? Rosie asks, voice trembling over the cellular connection.   

Question is, Jude answers before hanging up, does Mack have a choice?

Issuing a heavy sigh, Jude hands the phone back to his father.

Let’s have it, the old Captain says. The whole story from shit to roof shingles.

Just as he was quick with a physical I.D. of the perp, Jude recounts everything he saw and heard go down outside Sweeney’s—from the moment he spotted the two men running out of the gravel pit down through the wooded no-man’s land, to a pistol aimed at his own face, to total unconsciousness (and the killer’s getaway!).

Mack bites down on his lower lip like he always does when he’s nervous or buried in deep thought.

You’re sure the victim was being hunted?

It was a search and destroy. I’m sure of it.

Either one of them say anything? They argue?

Jude recalls eyeing the two men through the darkness and the rain. One man far thinner than the other, dressed in nothing but a T-shirt and boxer shorts, going down on his knees on the pavement, the longhaired killer standing over him, massive body clothed all in black, blue eyes glowing in the dim spotlight. In his right hand, he gripped a silenced automatic. In the other, an iPhone.

The longhaired man . . . the shooter . . . just before squeezing the trigger on that little man, he shouted out, ‘Scream for me.’

Scream for me?

He made the little man scream for him, and he recorded the sound of it in his phone, and then he shot him in the head.

Mack bobs his head, chews his lower lip. But Jude is taken aback. Because it’s apparent to him now that the phrase scream for me carries with it more than its share of familiarity for his father.

Exhaling, Mack says, Victim never put up a struggle? No defense at all?

I’m guessing the poor guy had to be spent. He just threw himself to his knees, screamed on command with every bit of whatever strength he had left, and then took two bullets to the back of the head like it was supposed to happen that way.

Pulling a pack of Marlboro Lights from his blazer pocket, the old captain fires one up with his Zippo. For Jude, a former smoker, the blue smoke that suddenly fills the cruiser smells good.

What do you make of the whole thing?

Pulse pounding, brow slick with sweat, Jude is now officially on the spot. Meaning his old man isn’t just picking his brain so much as confirming whatever theory or theories might be spinning inside his own.

After a beat he says, A not so random act of violence played out over time in the gravel pit. And for whatever reason, finally ending in the parking lot. Pausing, thinking. The killer took nothing from the victim before or after he shot him. If he robbed anything at all, it was the sound of his screams.

Maybe an all too deliberate act of scripted violence, Mack adds. Because if our long-haired perp is who I think he is, you just might be balls on right.

Jude stares into his father’s eyes. Marbles of slate gray partially obscured by cigarette smoke and worry. A sinking, organ slide feeling begins to wreak havoc on his insides. It’s the demon shifting, much like a baby will shift inside its mother’s womb. It tells him that by fate, or by chance, he’s entered into something larger and more complicated than the relative simplicity of one man killing another.

"But you are positive you did not freeze up or lose consciousness until after the perp took a shot at you? Mack presses. It’ll be important that we establish precisely when that happened. It can mean the difference between a reliable and an unreliable witness."

Raising his right hand, Jude touches the tender, now bandaged side of his head.

Blood runs fast through the veins.

He allowed a killer to get away. Or, at the very least, made no attempt to stop him from killing the T-shirted man. As Mack so gently put it, he froze up, hid himself behind the dumpster. Maybe there’s no changing that now. But then, it’s not the first time the demon has gotten the better of the former cop.

Perking up, Jude makes a futile attempt at a fake smile.

I got an excellent look at him. Just before he took a shot at me.

Maybe he’s reaching sky high for a vote of confidence, but Jude can’t help but sense the hesitation in Mack’s tight-lipped expression. Can’t help but sense the distrust.

Mack returns the smile with a smile of his own. But the gesture is almost too shiny-happy-polite. Too forced.

If you’re okay with that, kid, Mack whispers. Then I’m okay.

4

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Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

Tuesday, 7:40 A.M.

Pregnant silence and stale cigarette smoke compete for space inside the Jeep.

Mack stares at Jude with eyes like x-rays, able to see through the skin and flesh, all the way into the demon. Jude locks onto those eyes and at the same time, feels the breath leave his lungs.

Fathers and sons . . .

Without either man having to acknowledge it, both are thinking the same thoughts.

The murder/suicide of Oscar Burns—the single defining moment in Jude’s adult life. The day the demon invaded his body and kicked out his soul.

The not-so-distant memories flashfire through Jude’s brain.

He and Mack entering into Elizabeth Bay by patrol boat, slipping into an empty dock slip; Mack begging his son to sit the hostage crisis out; that it’s still too soon since Jude’s transfer from Missing Persons to Violent Crimes.

But Jude having none of that.

He’s going in and nothing can stop him. Burns has asked for him by name and Jude is the only member of the LGPD who can enter into the cabin in the hopes of talking the crazy man into laying down his weapon or, at the very least, releasing his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter. This is what Jude has trained for. This is why he fought so hard for the transfer to VC in the first place.

Handing over his service weapon to his father, Jude makes his way up the slope until he stands atop a concrete doorstop covered with a doormat that says, Go Away! Jude knows how much Burns must mean it. You don’t set up inside a cabin off Elizabeth Bay because you need a break from civilization. You do it because you want out.

Slowly approaching the door, Jude is surprised to hear his voice tremble when he barks, It’s me, Mr. Burns! Jude Parish, LGPD! I’ve come to help you!

What happens next seems to occur in a sort of timeless haze so that Jude doesn’t know if events are occurring swiftly or slowly. All he knows is that the door is opened, and a shotgun barrel stares him in the face. He enters into the cabin only to hear the big wood door slammed behind him. It’s then a bearded, sweating, panting, Oscar Burns screams, They promised! They promised!

Jude feels his legs turning to rubber, his lungs constricting, mouth going beach-sand dry, eyes focused beyond the shotgun barrel to a mother and daughter huddled in the far corner of the empty cabin. They are dressed only in pajama bottoms and tops, faces painted with terror.

Adrenalin begins to fill Jude’s veins and capillaries. All warmth leaves his body, and a sickening coldness replaces it. Bright white lights flash behind his eyeballs, and his body freezes up.

Then comes a team of Glens Falls SWAT crashing through the back doors and kitchen windows. Screams and the stomp of jackboots fill the small cabin. \

Burns raises the shotgun barrel, presses the stock into his right shoulder, aims pointblank for mother and daughter. Jude is only a couple of feet away from Burns, but there is nothing he can do. He is paralyzed by the frigid demon.

What follows are explosions and blood and spattered brains.

What follows is violent death.

And what follows for Jude Parish is nothing but darkness and regret, as he collapses to the cabin floor and loses consciousness . . .

Mack reaches over the seat back, practically places his hand up against his stepson’s face. With a quick snap of his fingers, he breaks Jude out of his memory trance.

That tragedy . . . that horrible shit. It’s five years gone now; five full years behind you. Let it go, kid.

Jude feels the all too familiar lump in his stomach, a dull pain in the space between his eyes. He might be glancing out the open window onto a murdered man, the rubber sheet that covers the corpse now stained with blood. But somehow, he’s also looking inward at a beautiful mother and daughter, their faces blown away by the actions of a madman.

I had a window, Mack. I had a fucking window of opportunity to disarm Burns and I froze up. I saw that little girl’s brains paint the walls.

Mack smokes, exhales a thin blue stream.

Under the circumstances—with SWAT crashing the party like that—you did all that could be done.

Looking up into his father’s face, Jude works up a smile. But there’s nothing shiny happy about it.

Blame SWAT, Mack, he says. Go ahead. It’s easier that way. Then, shifting his gaze downward, he stares at hands folded tightly in his lap. But you can’t blame them for what happened this morning. Because what happened under this morning’s circumstances was my fault. I should have stopped that murder from happening.

Mack bites his lip, tosses the now spent cig out the open window, exhales the last of the blue smoke.

Look on the bright side, kid, he says. At least you got a good look at our perp.

But did I do enough?

Nodding, the old Captain reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a breath mint, pops it into his mouth.

You’re here. You’re alive. And you’re going to be my eyewitness. I’d say that’s enough.

5

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Wild Bills All Day/All Night Video Arcade

Lake George Village

Tuesday, 8:15 A.M.

Main Street cuts like a fault-line through Lake George Village.

The narrow two-way is situated one-hundred yards west of the Warren County Courthouse and the village green that surrounds it. During the summer, the crowded strip has the feel of a never-ending carnival. Its tourist congested, six-mile north/south runway is flanked on both sides with single and multi-storied brick or wood-sided bodegas, specialty clothing shops, pizza parlors, Chinese take-out joints, Indian eateries, felafel stands, doughnut shops, gift shops, a Gap outlet, an Abercrombie and Fitch, a Frankenstein Wax Museum of Horrors and Tortures. And bars. Biker’s bars. Lots of them.

Nestled within the smorgasbord of commercial establishments is Wild Bill’s All Day/All Night video arcade. Having discarded both the sedan and the silenced .22 Caliber automatic into the Hudson River not far from the lake’s heavily forested south end, Hector The Black Dragon Lennox now stands glued to a stand-alone video game called Hurl. At base, the kill game’s object is to manipulate a first-person shooter through a maze of under and above-ground tunnels, passageways, and hallways while killing off the mutated monsters (some of them invisible!) that leap out from every corner of the dark setting.

For Lennox, Hurl represents participatory video entertainment in its purist form. It enlists the classic components of a topnotch kill game: shadowy atmosphere, claustrophobic setting, disturbing pursuit, and kills.

Lennox should know.

The video game software designer could not be more aware of the specific components that go into making a great kill game. First you consult your map design. Then you add your polygons, your virtual imagery, your dynamic lighting, your dramatic shadowing, and your mesh optimizations. And, of course, you add the screams. All those beautiful screams. From there, you blend the cyber stew all into a realistic, almost Hollywood cinematic display of repeat kills and slaughter.

Inside Wild Bill’s ceiling-mounted neon lamps provide indirect illumination.

Nearly every square inch of wall space is occupied with stand-alone, first-person point-of-view kill games like Night Fighter, Frog Man, Fatality, Sniper Kill, Zombie Slayer, Hurl, and even Project Night Fright—a local favorite. The cacophony of electronic explosions, gunfire, laser fire, screams, and colliding fists make the place seem more like a battleground than a video game parlor. For most of the kids who occupy the place, only empty pockets can keep them away from the video death—from their High Scores, their H.P. (Hit Points).

He is no longer a kid.

Nor are his pockets empty. But the thirty-six-year-old Lennox can compete with the best of them. He stands like a messiah before his disciples, them being completely unaware of his true identity, nor the fact that he is the developer of two popular kill vids.

For now, he is no longer the Black Dragon.

He’s discarded his all-black clothing.

Now, he sports a different look entirely: white sneakers and wide-legged Carhartt pants, overly muscular arms bursting out of a too-tight T-shirt emblazoned with a Byzantine reproduction of a haloed Christ, the words JESUS IS MY SUPERHERO! printed above Him. The sleeveless shirt exposes a long, tail-coiled black dragon tattooed to the interior of his right forearm.

He’s been occupying the stand-alone game now for nearly an hour, since his gravel pit kill game ended on a surprising note—the appearance of an eyewitness outside the back doors to Sweeney’s Gym.

An eyewitness who got away with life.

Soon the LGPD superheroes will come to arrest him. When they do, they will attempt to